GitHub — perrybutler/rapid-server: A very high performance web server utilizing .NET sockets and async I/O comparable to Node.js Express and IIS 7.5.

Features

Current working features include:

• Event-driven, async I/O similar to Node.js (libuv) and IIS 7.5 for high performance and concurrency.
• Uses kernel-level I/O completion ports for async callback completions, and managed threadpool threads for async processing.
• Decent error handling and low failure rates (zero so far) during high congestion/concurrency.
• Output caching — frequently used resources are stored and served from an in-memory cache, greatly reducing number of I/O calls.
• Server is configurable with an XML file, allowing plain-text configuration of mimetypes, default documents, keep-alive (max requests/timeout), custom handlers aka interops (php, etc), compression (gzip/deflate), response headers, virtual hosts, etc.
• A client app is included for running benchmarks and observing the request/response cycle for any web server. Tested to work with IIS 7.5, Node.js, Apache, nginx and Rapid Server.

History

Based on research and concepts from my .NET Sockets project, this is the next evolution of it.

Requirements

Microsoft Windows, .NET Framework:

• Type1.Server requires .NET 2.0 (implements EAP / APM / IAsyncResult / Socket.BeginXXX Socket.EndXXX)
• Type2.Server requires .NET 3.5 (implements EAP / APM / SocketAsyncEventArgs / Shared Buffer / Socket.BeginXXX Socket.EndXXX)
• Type3.Server required .NET 4.0 (implements TPL / Tasks / ContinueWith)

Roadmap

Future milestones include:

Status updates

Status update November 23: Decided to take a CPU profile with SlimTune and see what could be optimized.

This shows that one of the slowest operations during our entire handling of a request is when calling IO.File.Exists to check if a file exists on the hard drive. This is done to locate the default document. It’s not a slow operation under normal conditions, but calling IO.File.

A noticeable improvement! That’s an extra 500 to 2000 requests per second without IO.File.Exists. This brings Rapid Server very close to IIS 7.5 in terms of performance. In reality, we cannot eliminate IO.File.Exists because it is used to locate the default document, but we certainly don’t need to do this on every request.

The result can be cached, or it can be skipped when we already have a cached response, which is probably how this optimization will be finalized. In case you’re wondering what the «S» means in the legend, it’s short for static, these benchmarks were done against a static web page.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAgpCa6spwlrCFuNR7QuPnw

Status update November 22: Further demonstrating the Benchmark feature in Rapid Web Client. Similar graphs will be used for displaying server performance. Let’s have a look at how Rapid Server, Apache, NGINX, IIS and node.js compare using ApacheBench. These servers are event-driven asynchronous I/O, with the exception of Apache which is synchronous.

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